


[End Scene]

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Boys In Love, Character Bleed, Emotions, Established Relationship, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 03:37:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4945315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The Death of Captain America</i> was, from conception to publication, one of the worst ideas Marvel had ever spawned.</p><p>So of course: they film it, anyway.</p><p>And he should not have been surprised by the way that it hits him. Runs him over and crushes him, skull to sternum, take after take after unforgiving take.</p><p><i>The Death of Sebastian Stan</i> is more accurate, to his mind.</p><p>Admittedly, though: it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	[End Scene]

**Author's Note:**

> An idea strikes you, sometimes. That idea will not leave you, sometimes. And even though you're not really the sort of author who does, or should, write that sort of idea, sometimes, that idea demands to be written.
> 
> This was one such idea. I do very much hope listening to it wasn't an awful lapse in judgement.

When the scene’s called, it’s a fucking blessing. It’s water for the dying, or refuge for the drowning, and he is both in that moment when the voice rings out and they can stop. They can finally fucking _stop_.

 _The Death of Captain America_ was, from conception to publication, one of the worst ideas they'd ever spawned.

So of course: they film it, anyway.

And he probably shouldn’t have been so goddamned surprised, really. The movie magic of the Marvel juggernaut, the suspension of disbelief not only encourage but made manifest, was unparalleled. So no, he should not have been surprised by the way that it hits him, waylays him. Runs him over and crushes him, skull to sternum, lungs straight into the heart so bad it burns, take after take after unforgiving take.

 _The Death of Sebastian Stan_ is more accurate, to his mind.

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though. 

Chris’s eyes open slowly, like maybe he’d actually fallen asleep as Sebastian had clawed, had raged, had wept over his still and bleeding body for the first, the fifth, the tenth, the hundredth time, and maybe he had. Fallen asleep. They’d been at this a long time, and Chris might have a certain feral grace in the bedroom, might stretch a move around Sebastian’s body with the limber strength of a mountain lion that Sebastian hadn’t ever quite expected but _love_ with a fire unimaginable, but Chris is no pet, no creature who can play dead on command without ceasing, without tiring, without giving in.

 _Play dead_ , Sebastian reminds himself. _Playing dead_.

Just acting. Just a farce.

Sebastian had done his duty to the scene and thrown himself at Chris’s body too late to stop the bullet, close enough to assure himself in every take of Chris’s warmth and still-beating blood except Sebastian’s own body had been too cold, Sebastian’s own heart had been pounding too hard, and somehow the repetition, the reinforcement every few minutes of how he couldn’t help, couldn’t save, couldn’t stop the way that strong and steady frame simply crumpled in and fell: it had sneaked up on him, the fingers on his heart that tightened imperceptibly, bit by bit, until they held only pulp and loose blood inside the palm. 

“Lunchtime?” Chris’s voice asks hopefully from where Sebastian’s reeling at his side, as Chris struggles against stiff muscles to sit up, shaking out his limbs against pins and needles before even daring to attempt to stand. Sebastian glances at him, watches the rise and fall of his chest and the way his pale makeup ends at the collar, shows the healthy glow of his skin where his shirt rucks up, pulls down at angles as he moves.

They called the scene. They’re done, it’s done. Sebastian can swallow, can breathe. He can leave it behind.

Chris’s eyes are on him, studying Sebastian now, lips tugging downward when Sebastian doesn’t speak. Doesn’t swallow or breathe, even though he can now. He can. It’s over.

Sebastian leaps to his feet and bolts before he’s sick on the goddamn set.

His legs are ungainly, though, in a way he can’t predict, in a way where they’re not his own. He doesn’t make it far down the corridor toward the studio doors before he trips, scrapes the heels of his palms in catching his landing and heaves, dry and useless as sobs overtake. A purge of so many things he hadn’t noticed building up and threatening to eat him alive.

“Seb!”

Of course Chris is after him, running toward him, sliding next to him and gathering Sebastian’s face in his hands in all but an instant. Of course Chris is there, with him.

 _Just an act_ , Sebastian tells himself, but repetition doesn’t seem to be working now to reverse the damage, not half as well as it did to inflict it.

“Baby, look at me.” Chris is breathless, eyes stretched wide with so much feeling and worry and fear and _love_ and he’s real. His touch is warm, and he’s flushing through the makeup left on his face, his chest is broad and lifting heavy and fast with strong breaths that Sebastian can feel on his skin. Chris seeks out Sebastian’s pulse to test it, and his eyes flicker in terror when they feel how it thrums. 

“What’s wrong, what do you need,” Chris asks, drawing him close and smoothing hands down his neck, down his arm, weighing his body like a fragile, precious thing. “Should I call a---”

“Fine.” Sebastian forces himself to croak, because he can see the start of a spiral in Chris, so much panic. So much of his heart in Sebastian’s unwitting hands. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” Chris shakes his head, back and forth and back like a compulsion, like a touchstone. “You’re so _not_ , Sebastian, don’t lie to me.”

Sebastian can see the vibration in Chris’s body, just barely visible, all the pent up energy of fear and the need to keep.

“I’m not,” Sebastian lets himself confess, gathering Chris’s hands in his own and lifting them to his lips. “I’m not, but...” 

Sebastian breathes in against Chris’s shivering hands, still halfway to trying to mend what he doesn’t even know how to fix, not yet, and Sebastian loves him with everything he’s got. He does. He absolutely does.

“I will be though. Just…” And Sebastian brings his lips to Chris’s wrists, breathes there until he can trick himself into maybe feeling a pulse. “I will, just...”

But it’s a maybe yes, a maybe no where he thinks he feels the force of Chris’s heart, and trickery’s had enough of a say, the untruths of Hollywood marvels and mayhem, havoc and heartbreak: enough. 

Sebastian doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t think twice or ponder any awkwardness as he bends, as he curls into Chris’s sturdy presence and presses into Chris’s chest to feel, to hear, to listen, to _know_.

Alive, alive, _alive_.

“Seb?”

And Sebastian can hear it, his name in Chris’s chest, and maybe he moans for it. Maybe he shakes for it, and maybe the tears come back. 

“It’s okay.” Chris is whispering to him, folding him in and stroking his hair. “It’s okay, shh.” Chris is kissing his head, his brow, his temple. Chris is breathing in Sebastian and Sebastian hears every hitch and rush. 

“Shh, it’s okay.”

It will be. Like this, with a drumbeat encircling and that voice suffusing the chest beneath him and the air around him, it will be.

“I didn’t,” Sebastian finally speaks against the pump of Chris’s blood, disturbs that perfect music to speak his own truth. “I didn’t think it would...”

“You never do,” Chris murmurs back, understanding what’s happened, reading Sebastian in a way no one else has ever managed, in a way that Sebastian should have shied from, would have fled from, were it anyone but Chris. “You never see it coming.”

He speaks from experience, Sebastian knows.

“I knew it wasn’t real.”

“It felt real though,” Chris answers, holds him just a touch closer. “It built up to be real.”

“Yeah,” and that’s exactly it. “Yeah.”

“I get it,”Chris assures him, soothes and coos and promises all at once somehow, because Chris is just that much of a marvel, just that infuriatingly, perfectly capable of calming the winds that sometimes threaten to take Sebastian and toss him from the world. “Hell, of all people, you _know_.”

“I do.” Sebastian nods into Chris’s chest, because that was how this had started, how the two of them came to be a _they_ , a _whole_ : they’d filmed that fall from the train one time too many, and Chris had botched more takes than he’d nailed with alcohol that was apple juice, with too many tears that were real, so real, and he too had needed to reach afterward, to touch. 

Chris _gets_ it. 

“Can I?” Sebastian still asks, though, more to hear the answer he knows he’ll receive, more to feel it, to listen to it wind through the wind and the thunder in Chris’s chest under his ear.

“As long as you need to. Forever,” Chris promises, swears it. “Always.”

Always. Sebastian likes the sound of that.

Always. _Always_.

 _Alive_.

“It’s not real,” Chris breathes again; not a push, but a support. Warm hands, at every sharp edge. 

“I know.”

“I’m right here.” And he is. Sebastian thanks god for that every day.

“I know.”

“If I’d known it’d do this to you, I’d have,” Chris shakes his head, and shakes Sebastian’s too with the heave of his inhale as his heartbeat grows tense, tight with the kind of righteous indignation Chris has never needed to learn to convey because that was in his blood, in his bones already. That was part of the man that Sebastian loved from the very start.

“They’re not even putting it in the _movie_ , for fuck’s sake.”

“They needed it, though,” Sebastian reminds him. “All the leaks, and the paps have been relentless, you know they have.”

“Fuck their red herring, Sebastian,” Chris seethes, and Sebastian doesn’t deny the thrill it gives him to listen to the heady pump of Chris’s protective, adoring, singly-suffused heart beating hard and fast for the preservation of Sebastian, and Sebastian alone.

“Fuck them, fuck the press, fuck the whole fucking film---”

“You don’t mean that.” And he doesn’t, Sebastian knows it, and Chris does too. The Death of the Captain had been their best chance to throw the dogs off the scent of where they’d _actually_ taken the plot, where they’d actually grown these characters into something new, something bold, something they’re all proud of and want to share, but at the right time. In the right way.

“Maybe I do,” Chris counters: petulant, but ultimately hollow. “Maybe.” 

Sebastian lifts his head and gives Chris a knowing glance. It’s not hard, anymore, to leave the safety of the sound and the feeling, pressed against life where it breeds, where it proves false all doubt. Chris’s eyes are big and blue and asking him if he’s okay, and Sebastian grins just a little, an answer. An answer so that Chris knows that he can give his own, in turn. 

“No, okay. Fine.” Chris admits, and Sebastian doesn’t have to be crushed, doesn’t have to be clung to Chris’s chest just then to read his heart, so plain in those eyes. So clear in that voice.

“But none of it matters without you.” And there was a time where Sebastian would have doubted that, truly. There was a time.

But not anymore.

“And seeing you,” Chris shakes his head, and now it’s Sebastian who’s grabbing Chris’s hands and squeezing them, holding him together where Chris’s swallow trembles in his throat. “Even if it’s just, I...”

Sebastian takes in the pleading gaze that Chris throws at him, so full of need and longing and aching and every wish in the world that it was only them, only what they needed, only who they were and could be on this spinning sphere in the dark. Sebastian drinks Chris in and knows that heart and knows they’re more alive in this moment, more alive _together_ in this world that he’d ever dreamt it possible to be. 

He smiles, and takes his thumbs to wipe what’s left of the painted pallor off Chris’s face. Kisses him soft, but so goddamn true it might move mountains, or part seas.

“You said lunchtime.” Sebastian stands, and pulls Chris up with him, chest to chest.

Chris raises an eyebrow. “Are you even hungry?”

“Starving, actually.” And he is, now that fear’s fled from the pit of his stomach, now that heartbreak’s stopped flooding his body and soul. “Come on.”

Sebastian tugs at his hand, but Chris stays put, eyes serious when they catch Sebastian’s.

“You’re sure?” Sebastian knows he can answer either way, either truth, and it won’t make a difference, because Chris loves him, and Chris will give wherever is needed. Whatever is needed.

It’s a beautiful thing, really, to know. 

“Mmm,” Sebastian nods, and feels warm, just then. Feels steady enough now that if he went back, and had to do it all again, he’d feel the heartbeat under his hands. The heat of a body that was just acting, just playing.

But at the end of the day, was all _his_.

“Just,” and Sebastian looks down and where his hand is still in Chris’s, still woven together tight, and asking is more of a matter of course. More of a matter of Sebastian still not being tired of hearing how quickly Chris answers, and with how much absolute certainty.

“Stay?”

And Chris doesn’t disappoint.

“You never have to ask.” He brings Sebastian’s knuckles to his lips, and then strokes them down his jaw.

“Not ever.”

Chris kisses the scraped skin of Sebastian’s palm and then surrenders himself to Sebastian’s will, hand held now instead of holding as Chris lets him lead the way.


End file.
